> You can actually make deterministic guarantees to your customers that not only your own systems are secure, but also that the systems of your vendors and other 3rd parties are as well.
You can make a "deterministic" guarantee, whatever that is, that your systems are secure? That's seems pretty bold and probably dangerous, no?
> That's seems pretty bold and probably dangerous, no?
Its not dangerous in my experience. The more dangerous angle for me is this belief that it is impossible (or hopelessly difficult) to build a secure system.
The reality is that it is only possible if you are willing to take total ownership of the entire vertical. If you control every single byte that enters and exits your enterprise, you can prove that things are secure. Is it practical to do this in all cases? No. Is it feasible in theory and in certain cases? Absolutely.
If you buy into the 3rd party hosting game, you instantly lose control over the critical variables you would need to in order to create the opportunity for these sorts of guarantees to exist in the first place. You (and your customers) will be stuck wondering about side channel damage and human factors that you have no direct control over. When you own the hardware and the real estate it is parked on top of, you can start to reel these things back in really quickly with powerful policy frameworks (2-person rules for critical changes, mandatory checklists, etc). These sorts of policies seem to work really well for very tricky areas like keeping our nuclear weapons from doing inappropriate things.
How do you know your own programmers aren't introducing security bugs? Or are even acting against your interests intentionally? It happens to every other software developer, why not you?
Do you build all your own hardware from raw materials? How do you know everyone in the supply chains is perfectly secure?
Attacks have succeeded against the CIA, against RSA, Google, and many others. Nuclear weapons plans have been stolen. I would not trust a vendor who claimed they could guarantee security.
You can make a "deterministic" guarantee, whatever that is, that your systems are secure? That's seems pretty bold and probably dangerous, no?